Despite Lewis's disdain for ‘the vulgarity of confession’ with its roots in the ‘real history’ of the author, there is in fact a strong confessional dimension to much of his writing. This is true not only of Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life, but also of his first published prose work, the autobiographical allegory The Pilgrim's Regress. In the important Preface which Lewis added to the third edition of the latter book, ten years after its first publication, he tried to remedy its ‘needless obscurity ’, and added that:

Here Lewis is going outside the text, and pointing to himself, with a vengeance. Such ‘vulgarity ’ might be excused because the Preface is literally outside the text, and has a strongly practical and didactic purpose. As Lewis says: ‘In this preface the autobiographical element in John [the hero] has had to be stressed because the source of the obscurities lay there. But you must not assume that everything in the book is autobiographical. I was attempting to generalise, not to tell people about my own life’ (PR 21).

Despite his disclaimer in the short Preface to Surprised by Joy, Lewis's autobiographical writing, both there and in The Pilgrim's Regress, is similar to the Confessions of Augustine (if not those of the ‘vulgar’ Rousseau) in that it has an explicit theological motivation. In the case of both Lewis and Augustine the writer is pointing to himself, but only the better to show the object of his vision and desire – that is, he believes, God. The opposition in The Personal Heresy between looking at the poet and looking with the poet's eyes seems here to break down, since we are being invited to look at the poet in order ultimately to see the vision of God. For God's sake look at me, the writer is in effect saying.